Monday, April 27, 2009

Last week, I had the honor to chat over the phone with Prof. David Gordon Wilson of MIT. It was an initiative I took as something told me I had to find out how he's doing and what he's up to these days, at the same time capturing some of his views and experiences on cycling, past and present.

Prof. Wilson is to the recumbent HPV as perhaps Gary Fisher is to mountain biking. A keen hiker and bicyclist, he was a former president of the International Human Powered Vehicle Association, and was editor of its journal Human Power from 1984 - 2002. During this time, he also taught engineering design, turbo-machinery and heat exchanger design to students at MIT. One of the many feathers in his cap was the Avatar-2000, a recumbent bicycle he co-designed with Fomac Inc. It won the non-UCI world bicycle speed record twice, 1982-1983.

While these things may not be quite familiar to people who don't know him well, his name is most popularly associated with the seminal text Bicycling Science, a book that acquired an almost cult like status after it was published by MIT Press in 1974. Flushing away previously held myth and folklore, it shed light into the physics and engineering of bicycles and steered the way for better technical understanding of the subject. This, together with some other supplementing events, stamped the official authority of bicycle 'guru-ship' on him.

Today, the book has undergone 3 revisions and is still studied and quoted from by cyclists and enthusiasts world over. I personally remember the occasions when I would borrow this book from my college library and sit on it for days. So much was my interest to read and understand this text that I got fined on several occasions by the library for not honoring my return dates (sheepish grin).

Prof. Wilson was born in 1928 in Warwickshire, England - a long way in the shadow of the first World War, and just a year or two after John Logie Baird had given the first public demo of the television and English women over 21 years of age had been enfranchised (Source). Ever since his childhood, he loved riding a bicycle and made it an immediate hobby, even prime to that of his desire of being a pilot.

In a chapter of his upcoming Memoirs, he writes that it was on his ninth birthday in February 1937, that he was presented for the first time with a Hercules single speed boy's bicycle by his father. By the time he was 12, he was riding a 3 speed bike with 26 inch wheels and handlebars that could be reversed to the semi-dropped position. By today's standards, it would easily be called a 'clunker', but David looked forward to every journey on that machine. In fact, he was to ride it for the rest of his stay in Britain for almost a quarter century.

WWII came and went and despite having some difficult personal experiences to go through, he would be single handedly organizing bicycle tours across the country with his friends while studying at Bishop Vesey's Grammar School in Sutton Coldfield. After graduation, he was encouraged to take up mechanical engineering at the University of Birmingham. This was a course of action that he fell back on after being turned down for armed service in the Royal Navy due to the demobilization (Memoirs manuscript, Chapter 3).

He first crossed the Atlantic in 1953 after a PhD from University of Nottingham, working his way in the engine room of a cargo boat on the Glasgow-Montreal run. In 1955, he was awarded a post-doctoral Commonwealth-Fund fellowship for study and research at MIT and Harvard. He worked as a turbine engineer at Boeing. After returning to work in Britain in the gas-turbine industry, he taught for two years in Nigeria and worked briefly with the VSOs (the British precursor of the US Peace Corps) in the Cameroons. For six years before joining the MIT faculty in 1966, he was Technical Director and Vice President of Northern Research and Engineering Corporation (NREC) in London and in Massachusetts.

It was there while working for NREC that he got the bright idea of sponsoring a worldwide bicycle design competition. It worried him as he discovered that as opposed to England, fewer adults were actually riding bicycles in the US. From many unfavorable personal experiences, he was also concerned that there were glaring deficiencies in modern bicycles that made using them more dangerous than they should have been.

So a competition to design a better bike that would encourage more cycling was proposed. It was widely publicized in the magazine Engineering from 1967-1969 and on April 11, 1969 the winning design was picked. It would be a recumbent bicycle designed by W. Lydiard which, to David, would spur a deep interest in recumbent design. He designed one in 1970 and took it to MIT to show it to his students, after which he decided to ride it home through Cambridge. To his amazement, people cheered him as he went past. The comfort, speed and safety benefits of recumbents were a revelation to him and he openly supported the movement in his teachings, letters and interviews. This interest in human powered vehicles, together with the book Bicycling Science that he had published soon after, would lift him to the status of a bicycle guru.

As if that wasn't enough to keep him busy, he also worked as a consultant to Abiomed Inc. where he designed the centrifugal pump used in Abiocor, the world's first artificial heart. In 2001 a group of MIT people ("Ignite") joined him to form Wilson TurboPower Inc., a startup company part-owned by MIT, with the aim of developing and producing very-high-efficiency regenerative heat exchangers and gas turbines. Dave was chair of the board of Common Cause, Massachusetts, in 2003, a group trying to reintroduce democracy into Massachusetts politics. He also co-founded and took leadership of MASH (Massachusetts Action on Smoking and Health), a group that worked for nonsmokers' rights.

He happened to even tell me the following :

"I used to be a beekeeper and worked for a bee farmer in Perry, Iowa a while ago."

David has held a number of respected positions, everything from an engineer at Boeing, gas-turbine designer at Ruston & Hornsby (UK), to editor of Human Power Journal, Chair of the IAP Policy Committee, VP of NREC, to currently Emeritus Professor at MIT, and President and CTO of Wilson TurboPower Inc. See here for more on his research interests and honorary titles accumulated over the years.

In the next couple in installments of this series, I will present to you some of the details of the conversation I had with him. Everything from Bicycling Science to his views on the current energy crisis. So stay buzzed!

15 comments:

Great piece - thanks. (I will tweet a link ... twitter can also be used for useful stuff, not just 'what I just ate' :-) it can even be used like a micro blog for those of us who are not as good at writing or blogging. (Come in Ron, the water's warm).

I too poured over every page of Bicycling Science - great book and great man. I was lucky enough to meet Dave in Toronto 10 yrs ago, a very modest guy. I am looking forward to Pt2 ... please keep us posted about the up coming Memoirs. .. Mark

Thanks for the mention on Twitter. I'm amused by the service but I don't think I'll be joining in the warm water anytime soon. Life isn't as entertaining :). Its funny, some of my friends are on Twitter and they exchange messages with Lance Armstrong. Too good to be true actually. My own Twitter like service runs on the left side of this blog (Mini Buzz). Anything interesting that i find which does not need a whole post dedicated to it goes there.

Mark, Alloycowboy : I'm flattered. Never thought of writing a book. Actually, I used to scribble novels and short stories as a hobby from an early age... I feel it'd be leaner and greener (and maybe meaner) if I left all the material on this blog free, for anyone to access on the web, instead of having trees cut down for pages of words. :)

1.Websites come and go, knowledge and experience is often lost because some one failed to write it down.

2.By creating a body of knowledge you are helping advance the bicycle.

3. Much like my self, you enjoy learning about bicycle technology and look at it from an engineering point of view.

4. Why not share your love of cycling with other people and in exchange for better bike parts and more riding time.

5.People like buying and readings books. Since they are going to buy and read books any way they might as read one of yours.

6. Writing a book would give you a good excuse to interview Liz Hatch. (http://www.velodrome.org.uk/vb12.html)

7.Lance might let you ride his bike.

8.Bike companies will invite you out to test there products.

9.You will get to see where all the cool bikes are made.

10. Free bicycle swag.

On second thought Ron, maybe it would be more fun to start a magazine called "Bicycle Babes and Technology". We could look at the hottest cycling technology from an in depth engineering point of view and also interview the finest women in cycling.

Rons knowledge should, after my opinion, be dokumentated in paper form, thats for sure. It shouldn't be that difficult to extract allr written Blog's from this site and copy paste them. So maby we should add a point 11 to the list.

Cervelo approached me twice. I turned them down both times, not only because my interests (alteast now) are elsewhere for a career but the recruiter who contacted me was sort of brash, wondering if they could get to hire somebody good really QUICK .... (like those "quick rich" schemes they have). Then that individual started being tardy with responding to my followup emails. That pretty much sealed the death of wanting to work at Cervelo. No more.

I might start one of those get rich quick schemes you know...where a blogger starts asking for "donation money" from his readers when they don't even know who the heck he is? That gets me laughing every time... maybe you can be my first donator? :)